How to Use Pinterest to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

During the course of our Pinterest Challenge, we’ve covered a range of photography topics, all with the goal of helping our readers to understand how to take amazing pictures. Today, we’re turning our attention to specifically examining effective ways to use Pinterestto increase traffic to your blog.

What is Pinterest? Just the latest craze when it comes to sharing wedding ideas, how to decorate your home, and what to cook.

It can also be a tremendously useful platform to share photos and drive traffic to your blog.

Here are several steps to increase traffic that you can put to use.

How to Get Traffic to Your Blog Using Pinterest

Create a Pinterest Profile

Do you have a Pinterest account? If you do, I strongly suggest linking your Pinterest profile to your blog, as well as writing a little about yourself and mentioning your blog in the “about” section. It’s a get way to connect with new readers and get traffic to your blog. Other Pinterest users may even decide they want to follow your blog too. SCORE!

How to Link Your Blog to Your Pinterest Profile:

Step 1: Log into your Pinterest account.

Step 2: Click on the “Settings” option.

Step 3: Scroll down to where it says “about” and “website” and put in your address and information.

Step 4: Go to the bottom and click “Save”.

Step 5: You will see a globe under your profile picture. This icon should link to your site.

Why Pinterest Works for Bloggers

Pinterest is an amazing tool to use as a blogger. I was shocked at how much traffic I’ve started to get from Pinterest. People are able to pin images from my site, which link back to my site, and when someone sees an image with a title they like, they click on it, and now they are reading my information.

Pinterest is my second largest referral site. In fact, I took the month of November off last year (I was on vacation) and didn’t post anything. I didn’t even check my stats because I knew they would be depressing. When I came back from vacation and checked my stats, I actually had more traffic in November (when I didn’t post) than in the previous month when I was posting about 5 times a week. Thanks to Pinterest people were still coming to my blog, leaving comments, and becoming followers even though I hadn’t posted a thing!

As you can see on the below chart taken from Google Analytics for November 1-30, 2011, Pinterest was actually my number one source for traffic.

Here is a screen shot from Google Analytics for the last 30 days on my blog. It shows how on an average month, Pinterest is my 2nd leading referral site.

{Feel free to download the 900×900 white jpg I talk about in the PicMonkey video here.}

Don’t forget to insert your website name or URL on your button. This will help readers to find you, especially if a pin is not linked directly to your site at some point.

Here are a few examples of buttons I have made:

Some of the older badges below do not include my website and logo. For anyone taking the time to create an image for Pinterest, you’ll want to make sure that at least your blog name is on each button.

The first button I made was for a post on Photography Projects for 2012. That isn’t my most pinned post, but it was one that got pinned very quickly. I was shocked when I noticed it had been pinned between 40-50 times in the first hour! After that, I was hooked and knew I needed to make pinnable buttons for more of my posts.

Notice how all my buttons use the same color and font as my website? I do my best to keep my branding consistent throughout my buttons so when someone sees them on Pinterest they think, “Oh, this is from Click it Up a Notch! I MUST check it out because she is amazing!”

{Okay, a girl can dream.}

I don’t make a button for every blog post because, let’s be honest, not all posts are extremely pinnable or even the type of post that are popular on Pinterest. We’ll go over what types of posts are most popular amongst pinners later this week!

About Alina Thomas

Alina is a Northern Virginia wedding photographer based out of Leesburg, VA. She has a passion for arts and design, and strives to express it through her work. She is creative at heart and loves nothing more than sharing her knowledge in photography with other Virginia wedding photographers on her blog each week. Alina loves being a new mom to her first-born and spending time with her husband who helps her run her businesses. Please feel free to follow her on: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest or Google+.